Reflections on the contemporary church, culture, Christian philosophy and doctrine.

Monday, June 22, 2015

Can I Love The Sinner And Hate The Sin? It's The Only Way To Love

There has been a lot of talk recently about the Christian
doctrines of love and sin, mostly in the shape of, “I no longer can keep up the
unbiblical façade of loving the sinner and hating the sin. The Bible calls me
to love, and that is what I am going to do.”

While I believe deeply that we are called to love in
extravagant and radical ways – ways shown to us by God in Christ – I believe
the recent talk about refusing to see people as sinners actually strips the
Christian of the ability to love in this deep and transformative way. Contrary
to the assertion that “love the sinner and hate the sin” is not in the Bible,
it is necessary to the character and nature of God, and is, ironically, all
over Scripture. It turns out that you are unable to love the sinner without
hating the sin.

The first and most readily available analogy is the way a
good parent loves their child. Any parent will tell you that they often live in
the tension of loving their child while hating the things they do or the
character traits within them that cause them harm. Have you ever known a parent
in the middle of struggling over a rebellious teenager? In theological
language, that is nothing more than loving the person prone to sin while hating
the things in them that cause them harm. In fact, you might say the two sides
of that parental disposition IS love. If you disagree, then you will need to
convince most of the humans you know that a parent who allows their child to do
each and every thing that will cause them short-term and long-term harm is a
good parent. Obviously they are not.

And so it is with God. It is common for Scripture to
speak of what God hates and why he hates it. Modern evangelicals don’t often
think or speak in these terms, but maybe that is because many of us have been
trained by our churches to conform the Bible to our current proclivities
instead of the other way around. A small sampling of the Bible talking about
God hating sin:

Isaiah 61:8 For I the Lord love justice; I hate robbery
and wrong; I will faithfully give them their recompense, and I will make an
everlasting covenant with them.

Jeremiah 44:4 Yet I persistently sent to you all my
servants the prophets, saying, ‘Oh, do not do this abomination that I hate!’

Zechariah 8:17 do not devise evil in your hearts against
one another, and love no false oath, for all these things I hate, declares the Lord.

Christ-followers are people who belong to this kind of
God and are thus expected to learn to interact with the world the way God does.
As a consequence, we are expected to have the same kinds of loves and hates
that God has. For example:

Micah 3:1-2 And I said: Hear, you heads of Jacob and
rulers of the house of Israel!

Is it not for you to know justice?— you who hate the good
and love the evil,

who tear the skin from off my people and their flesh from
off their bones,…

Ezekiel 35:6 therefore, as I live, declares the Lord God,
I will prepare you for blood, and blood shall pursue you; because you did not
hate bloodshed, therefore blood shall pursue you.

Amos 5:15 Hate evil, and love good, and establish justice
in the gate…

And then there is the passage in the New Testament which
is cited most often to promote the idea of loving the sinner and hating the
sin:

Jude 21-23 keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting
for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life. And have
mercy on those who doubt; save others by snatching them out of the fire; to
others show mercy with fear, hating even the garment stained by the flesh.

Here Jude makes a direct link between the love of God,
our acts of love and mercy, and snatching people away from the sin that so
easily destroys us.

All in all, the evidence is pretty overwhelming – the best
way to love people who sin is to hate the things in their life that cause
destruction – sin.

This is radical love. To refuse to acknowledge or talk
about sin is a weak and easy way to like people, but it is not biblical love.
God’s love is often very hard to live out. If you have ever loved someone who
is not exactly like Christ, you have loved someone who needs the kind of Christ-like
love that makes sacrifices for sin and remains loving through all kinds of trials
and rejections. Jesus loved Judas. Not in a way that refused to hate the sin,
but in spite of the sin. Jesus loved the woman caught in adultery when he
simultaneously saved her life and told her to go and sin no more. Jesus loved
disciples who often misunderstood him. God showed steadfast love to a nation of
people who were persistent in their rebellion against him.

God’s kind of love recognizes sin and rebellion in the
human heart and shows unconditional love anyway. This is the kind of love the
world needs to see in the church. This is the kind of love I am required by my
God to show. This is the kind of love I need – the love that sees my sin and
saves me anyway.